Is Going Self-Employed Worth It In 2026? w/ Dean Jones

So sometimes people feel like they could be perhaps trapped in a job.

They might, you might be doing things that you don't particularly agree with or wanna do anymore, and, um, you know, it can be quite difficult to make the jump over to self-employment.

What kind of, um...

Or tell us about leaving British Gas.

What made you think, um, I need to do this on, on your own?

So there was a couple of reasons initially.

The main reason was in the end I didn't really have much choice, so there was a sort of fire and hire, fire and rehire tactics used to, um, I think, get rid of the, some of the workforce and, and, uh, different things like that.

But there was a few adjustments made a few years before that to pensions.

So when I started 20 odd years ago on a final salary pension, it looked like you could work for a, a company until you came to retirement age and then you'd have a, a great pension.

But they made some quite big changes to that, that made me realize if I stayed where I was, then my pension and retirement wouldn't be what I expected it to be.

So I'd sort of already thought of plans of moving before the, the, uh, contractual changes.

But to cut a long story short, we were given a new contract, which I, I didn't like or agree with, and you had to sign it, and if you didn't sign it, you went.

So I did, and that's when I started up Jones The Gas.

Okay.

And did you kind of plan prior to that or did this kind of come out of the blue and you were kind of like, "Oh, oh, I need to do something now"?

Yeah.

It was, to be honest, it was almost like a perfect storm because COVID was happening.

I was furloughed at the time.

I was actually looking into going into a completely different industry altogether.

Uh, I was that fed up with the job and stuff like that, which is strange because I absolutely love heating and, and gas engineering.

You know, I eat, sleep, and breathe it.

It's, uh, it's something I've done for a long time and I love doing it, so to think that I was gonna leave and do something else, you know, seems a bit alien to me now.

But it, it was just at a point that I had a lot of time on me hands so I could do a lot of research.

I could look into, uh, what van I was gonna get, what tools I needed to get.

Uh, and then I was looking into software, obviously found Gas Engineer Software, uh, which has been a massive help from day one to be honest.